Category Archives: Development

Book Review: Linkers & Loaders

Posted on January 13, 2013 by Michal Necasek

A Few Decades Late Book Reviews Linkers & Loaders, by John R. Levine Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, October 1999; 256 pages, ISBN 1-55860-496-0; $60.95 Published in 1999, Linkers & Loaders is one of the more recent books reviewed in this series. … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Development | 1 Comment

Master Builders of OS/2

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Michal Necasek

The MS OS/2 videos exhibit has now been completed with the addition of two PDF documents. These are scans of two fat three-ring binders that were handed out to attendees of the Microsoft OS/2 Developer’s Conference in New York City … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Microsoft, OS/2 | 11 Comments

Windows NT BSOD Aclock Port

Posted on November 7, 2012 by tenox

Do you remember the famous Windows NT Blue Screen Of Death? For years it was a source of jokes and bad reputation of Windows reliability. There even was a Blue Screen Saver! Today we fortunately see much less of it, but it … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Development, NT, VGA, Windows, x86 | 10 Comments

No comments in source code? Really?

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Michal Necasek

A few weeks ago I came across an interview with an academic software researcher, now working for Microsoft. (Unfortunately the interview was in a non-English print publication, so I can’t link to it.) The interview was quite interesting, far better … Continue reading →

Posted in Development | 14 Comments

Book Review: DOS Internals

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Michal Necasek

A Few Decades Late Book Reviews DOS Internals, by Geoff Chappell Addison-Wesley, March 1994; 768 pages, ISBN 0-201-60835-9; $39.95 DOS Internals is a very unusual book. Written by an academic whose field isn’t computer science, it is a in-depth and … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Development, DOS, Microsoft | 6 Comments

Phantom 3.0

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Michal Necasek

As previously mentioned, the OS/2 Museum adapted the Phantom redirector example from the second edition of Undocumented DOS to demonstrate that the redirector interface was already fully implemented in the August, 1984 release of PC DOS 3.0, a fact apparently … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, DOS | 36 Comments

MS-DOS OAKs

Posted on May 25, 2012 by Michal Necasek

Prior to 1991, Microsoft did not sell MS-DOS to end users directly. Although MS-DOS 3.2 (1986) and later was available to system builders as a “packaged product”, most PC users would get an OEM version of MS-DOS with a new … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, DOS, Microsoft | 11 Comments

Watcom Win386

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Michal Necasek

When Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, the press loved it and users bought it in droves. Unfortunately, technically it was at best a step sideways, and Windows 3.0 was the cause of many sleepless nights for application developers. Even … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Development, Windows | 13 Comments

Kernel Debugging with VirtualBox

Posted on February 21, 2012 by Michal Necasek

Virtualization readily lends itself to debugging of low-level code that is difficult to analyze in conventional environments. It is also convenient for kernel debugging which would otherwise require two separate systems or at least a separate serial terminal. OS/2 Setting … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, OS/2, VirtualBox | 4 Comments

Retro development with aclock

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Michal Necasek

In the past few days, I embarked upon a project to port Antoni Sawicki’s aclock, a small text-based clock program (aclock stands for analog clock), to 16-bit Windows. While aclock itself has been ported to over 150 platforms, it is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, PC history, Windows | 14 Comments